The REAL reason China built so much – Transcript

00:02(envelope rips) (letters clattering) - Okay. Hey. - Hey.- I got your package, and I'm not sure what I'mdoing here or looking at, or what I'm supposed to do next.

00:18- So your task is to usesome of these shapes, not all of them, to, from memory,assemble the Chinese flag. - Okay. Okay, wait, why am I doing this?

00:35This all began with some videos. - China is next level. - This might be the biggestbuilding I've ever seen. - If they tried to buildsomething like this in America, it would take at least two decades. - Okay, this is insane. - This city does not look real, bro! - It looks 4K. - Videos that started appearing on my feed a couple years ago.

00:53- Every time I come to China, I just realize how farbehind my country is. - China doing some things. - I don't understand how the architects were able to build a city like this. - [Vlogger] Train stations inChina are absolutely insane. - [Johnny] Videos of people, most of them from the United States, experiencing something thatfelt genuinely brand new and exciting.

01:14- ...next to one of the most impressive modern marvels of engineering. - Modern China. - [Vlogger] Look at the twinkles. Look at the twinkles.- Oh, they've gone off! Agh!(bystander laughing) - [Bystander] It's all coordinated! - [Vlogger] China isdecades ahead. - [Johnny] I read anarticle about these videos, spoke to the guy who wrote it.

01:30- They're just surprised by, like, technical innovation essentially. - A train going into a building! What the -- - These videos are fun,and they're awe-inspiring, but they also made me start to wonder: what am I actually looking at here?

01:46What is this? How did China build all of thisstuff, and what does it say- - Johnny. No, you cannot make this video. - [Johnny] No, but I just needto look into this thing that- - You are in the middle ofproducing a documentary series that releases in a few weeks.

02:01- It's true. In a few weeks' time, youwill see "The Human Element," my new adventure show where I travel all around theworld to find human stories that teach us about themost important issues happening around the world. (light thoughtful music) I can't wait to share it with you.

02:19It's coming soon. Anyway, the fact that this new series has been all of my focuspretty much all year is actually part of why you've seen so much of this guy lately. This is Adam. Adam is my producer, andhe has been diving deep into many of the things that I have been deeply curious about and would make a video about, but I haven't had the time orfocus to actually dive deep.

02:42So Adam has dived deep,and he's very good at it. - [Adam] I would actually argue that you should spend more time talking about how awesomeI am. I think I would say.... - So when Istarted fixating on China and its infrastructure andwhy it looks like this, I turned to Adam for help. I can imagine an explainer section that's like, "Let's get to the bottom of how China's government andsociety actually works.

03:04How decisions are made,who controls power, how the economy works." - That could be interesting. - Adam and I made videos this year about fascism, oligarchy, democracy. So I knew that if weworked on this together, we'd have to get intoit from a specific angle to look at what the systemis behind all of this stuff.

03:24What are the systems thatmade China look like this? And a central question forme is, is this communism? Like, China's communist, right? And to be totally clear, I know that what we'relooking at in these videos is a snapshot of a veryspecific slice of China.

03:39That's what a lot of youare thinking right now. This isn't all of China. This is rich coastal cities that don't represent most of China and Chinese people's experiences. China is obviously not a perfect society, and yet they're able to builda lot of things very quickly. And my main hypothesis thatI think a lot of us share is, well, they're able to do it because they're a dictatorship.

03:58They've got one leaderwho calls all the shots. When you're a dictatorship, you can just wave your magicwand, and stuff gets built. If a leader wants a bridge,they build a bridge. But that turns out to not quite be it. The truth, as we learned more, turned out to be much moreinteresting and surprising and informative about whatmodern China actually is.

04:20And so that's what we aregoing to talk about today. What is the system thatproduced the China we see today? What do we call it? Where did it come from? And how has it been able toso quickly make all of this? (light gentle synth music) (light poignant music) - Okay, so why did youmake me make a flag?

04:49- So we're gonna get to that in a second, but first I know that oneof your biggest questions was, like, "Is China actually communist?" - Yes. Modern China to me feelsvery clearly capitalist and not communist. - Right.

05:04So one of the first thingswe're gonna talk about is why that distinctiongets complicated, right? Because we have beentaught our whole lives to think of economies interms of either state-run, like the Soviet Union, or market-driven, like the United States.

05:19So in the Soviet Union, wherethe state ran the economy, businesses were owned by the state, land was owned by the state, and the decisions behind what the economy was actually producing,also decided by the state. Whereas in a market-driveneconomy like ours, businesses are typically privately owned, most property, typically privately owned, and what gets produced, it is determined by the market.

05:43To me, that was the modelthat I always understood, you know, capitalism versus communism. And China completely upends that, right? So in China, you havemultiple entire industries that are state-owned,like oil, like airlines, like telecommunications. They also, though, have anenormous private sector.

05:58Think about Huawei, think about Alibaba. Land in China is alwayspublicly or collectively owned. So it's either owned by the state or owned by collectives of citizens, but individuals anddevelopers can lease land, and factories and housesand apartments can be owned. So you can own your house in China, but you don't own the land that it's on.

06:16China's government haspoured tons of money into sectors of the economylike electric vehicles, batteries, solar, semiconductors, AI, but also there are hugeparts of their economy that are market-dictated. Like, they didn't make WeChat. There are tons of industries and very successful companies in China that did not get help from the government in the same way at all.

06:37- They do not have acommunist, Soviet-style, centrally planned, state-run economy. - Wait, Max is in this video? - [Adam] Oh, you mean ourcolleague, Max Fisher, host of the Newpress channel,"The Bigger Picture," former New York Times correspondent who has spent a lot oftime reporting on China? - A zillion conversations withpeople who are from China, China experts, China economists,China political scientists.

06:58- Okay, so China is communistand capitalist then, right? - It has features of both, but for an ordinary Chinesecitizen, a lot of their life would basically lookcompletely familiar to you. You earn a salary, you havemoney in a bank account, you shop at privately owned businesses, you order food from restaurants that are competing with each other.

07:15You can buy a car, youcan buy an apartment, you can invest your money. If we're asking if China is communist, if we look at only their economy, that's gonna give us areally strange answer. That's what this graphic,that system of thinking about communist versus capitalistthat I've always had, this is looking at the economy.

07:33- But then where is communismin everyday life then? Is it even there at all? - Okay, so now you can show me your flag. - [Johnny] This is what I did. - [Adam] Yeah. Not quite. You came very close. - "China flag."

07:48Oh, (beeps) so it's not this. It is a big old star. - Yes. So it's one big star andfour small stars, basically. You came close. My question for you is, do you know what anythingon this flag represents? - No clue.- Okay. So the four small stars on the flag represent what, back in the 1940s, they considered to bethe four social classes.

08:10And if you're looking at the actual flag, you'll notice that theyare not all upright. Those four small starsare kind of like pointed. They're turned around a little bit. The tops of them are allpointed towards the big star. And the big star is theChinese Communist Party. And the reason we are looking at this is that the party is notjust in charge of China.

08:30China is actually built around the party. - But I have a kind ofa dumb question here. What is, quote, "the party?" Like, we talk aboutChina's Communist Party, and I know what politicalparties here are. Like, here in the West,we have the Democrats, the Republicans, whatever,but this feels different.

08:49I don't think this is the same. The Chinese Communist Partyseems like a different thing, and I do not understand it. - Yeah. So I have been thinking about it like... (light inquisitive music) The population of China is, like, you know, 1 1/2 billion, right? Only about 7% of these peopleare members of the party, so a small slice, but in China that is,like, 100 million people.

09:13Now, these party members aremembers of a club, basically. It's not a job. They are members, and they join fordifferent reasons. You can join because ideologicallyyou feel very aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. Maybe you just want to serve your country.